like someone safe ashore. Still more strange was it to see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He had a line or two rigged up to help him across the widest spaces—Long John’s earrings, they were called—and he would hand himself from one place to another, now using the crutch, now trailing it alongside by the lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet. some of the men who had sailed with him before expressed their pity to see him so reduced.
"He’s no common man, Barbecue,” said the cock-swain to me. ‘He had good schooling in his young days, and can speak like a book when so minded; and brave—a lion’s nothing alongside of Long John! I see him grapple four and knock their heads together—him unarmed.”
All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a way of talking to each and doing everybody some particular service. To me he was unweariedly kind, and always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as clean as a new pin; the dishes hanging up burnished and his parrot in a cage in the corner. “Come away, Hawkins,”’ he would say; ‘‘come and have a yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son. Sit you down and hear the news. Here’s Cap’n Flint—I calls my parrot Cap’n Flint, after the famous buccaneer—here’s Cap’n Flint predicting success to our v’yage. Wasn’t you, cap’n?”
And the parrot would say, with great rapidity: "Pieces of eight! pieces of eight! pieces of eight!” till
